Sunday, November 16, 2008

Paths of Glory, Texas Glory Update

Just got word that Texas Glory, the new Columbia Games block game about the Texas War of Independence is shipping.

Jose and I just finished our second campaign game of Paths of Glory. Jose's Central Powers won in the Summer of 1918 after I resigned. My undoing can be traced to August 1914. The Germans had launched an offensive into Sedan that failed miserably. The French couldn't stand to sit in their forts and launched a massive counterattack into Sedan. Sedan is exposed to attack from 3 sides and the French armies were decimated. This allowed the Germans to advance deep into France and besiege Paris. The Allies were able to recover but not before the Germans were able to form a heavily fortified line running from Calais to Amiens to Strassbourg. This proved to be a handicap for the rest of the game.

Even so, the Allies stayed in the game and made the CP work for their victory. It remained close into 1918, when my Balkan expedition got caught out of supply. That was the final straw and I decided to throw it in.

6 Comments:

Mark recovered quickly from the initial central power offensives and started to bring the superior allied manpower to bear. He wisely shortened his line in the italian front and freed up two armies that combined with the Salonika expedition to liberate Belgrade and came very close to taking Sofia. However his supply line was very tenous and the austrian army defending Bulgaria was able to drive off the serbians in the mountains and cut off the italian advance.

I recommend this game to anyone that has some curiosity about the Great War. It is a brilliant design.

For your first learning game FTF is best, but online is the only practical way to play a complete campaign. Jose and I played our campaign using Vassal over 4 sessions totalling about 24 hrs. It's a difficult game to get your hands around but worth it once you do.